Community Guy – Jake McKee

@Daryll: I'll play you on S/C anytime. I assume you know SC II is finally on its way out. Check out Blizzard's site. Terran rules!

As a former public school teacher, my heart goes out to the commenters who remind us of the important communities out there that don't have access to the "connected-ness" that we so easily take for granted.

These are great stories and thoughts everyone! Thank you so much for sharing. I never thought I'd get teary-eyed over a gaming forum!

No tear jerker here... sorry to disappoint ya Jake. I think my experience with online communities has proven to me that ...
with numbers, we feel accepted and "normal" or free to let our guard down, even when our interests seem out of line with the direct community that surrounds and serves us.

That can be a powerful thing.

I have actively sought out online communites for various things, hobbies & interests, social networking, work related issues or and parenting concerns.

Although I have met wonderful people and shared more than just common interests with some of these people I met online (and eventually offline) it was the last category "parenting" that changed my life in the most profound ways.

My child has a condition that most people are not familiar with. I have spent countless hours trying to not only learn about this condition, but also educate his teachers, family and extended community all while trying to be his advocate in a system that is not prepared or ready to allow ppl to live outside the alloted box.

This condition is stressful for him, and I divide myself between trying to help him cope and be as educated as I can be in this field so I can help others understand. It was the online community that allowed me to reach beyond medical journals, drugs and cold unfeeling advice and techniques to pair up with and learn from others living through this.

It is their stories and knowledge, their misgivings and frustrations, their accomplishments and successes, and most of all their understanding and compassion they share without asking nor expecting anything in return. Now that takes trust.

I'll take doors number two and three. I'll leave off my first experience with online communities (from way back in the dialup bulletin board days) as I'm getting too old too recall the details, plus things didn't turn out that great. I'm going for positive here.

First, one of my favorite stories about the power of community groups.

About two years ago, I found out I was working side-by-side with two guys who ran an online gaming forum that had about 130 members. About half of them were local to our area, and the other half were scattered throughout the country. They used the forum as their primary communication vehicle to plan game times and discuss strategies. The forum at that time had over 50,000 posts. They had been doing it for years (and are still doing it). Through their teamwork, they had become one of the most feared gaming "clans" in their respective gaming worlds.

I still want to interview the head of the clan so I'm holding back a few things here. But I discovered he was married, held a decent job, had two small children, but spent probably 20 hours a week playing video games and managing his "clan". He didn't seem to realize that he had accomplished so much that others only dream about. Just an average guy, but he had mastered the art of the fine balance between control and community. They had strict rules for participation and required certain commitments. But what impressed me most was that the average age of their members was in the mid 30's. In other words, these were not kiddies. Most of them didn't have MySpace profiles and none of them have Facebook (or even care about it).

What inspired me by getting to know these guys was that they had, by creating a community, accomplished real activity (winning major tournaments). Some of them had never even met in person. Most didn't have blogs. The founding four members never intended to grow some big forum or become an "online community", per se. In fact, when I mentioned what they had, in effect, done (and how it could be used as an example to others in different spheres of life besides gaming), they hardly understood what I was babbling about. In essence, the technology that enabled this to happen was invisible. As far as they were concerned, what they were doing wasn't much different than a few guys meeting at the local arcade every Saturday 20 years ago.

Now to Part III - I do, in fact, have a vision of how I'd like to see communities change the world. Or more accurately, perhaps, how I'd like to see communities (particularly online communities) change THEIR world.

I think the key ingredient missing in so much of the fabric of social networking is the isolation of one group to each other. You join one space but you aren't on another. Everyone seems desperate to belong, but you can only belong to so much. While there are mashup websites which will spin all your social network profiles into one huge web page, I still think we are missing the boat.

The internet IS the social network of our society. I see a future where everyone has their own domain name - not just bloggers and tech pundits. But everyone. Blogging platforms are making this easier for the average Joe. Blogger and WordPress are great starts, but they still cater to the tech folks, the writer types (ahem!), the self-aware, the creative media folks, and quite often, the lonely. What about the framing contractor who works 70 hours a week. Where's his blog? When does he "read" anyone else's blog? Not often. If ever.

I'd like to see two things to change this and I think we are on the very real cutting edge of this happening.

First domain name setup has to be easier. I know plenty of people who can't manage a GoDaddy registration (much less a renewal). Granted, I make good money handling this for them, but this has got to change.

Second, we need built in (click and point - to use an Apple motto) self publishing and it has to be all around us. You buy a HD video camera and you hook it to your USB port. It should prompt you "Would you like to put clips of this on salberg.org?" and automatically choose clips that it thinks may be interesting based on mathematical algorithms of action and sound.

You get in your car and almost hit someone and your vehicle should say, "Would you like to comment on what just happened?" and it puts your voice rant right up on your website.

Forget Twitter. Life is twitter. Typing is for the geek in all of us. We have to get to the place where ALL of society can participate in this great conversation. As long as only the folks who can (or need) to take the time to post (type) thoughts and ideas at later times - and who have laptops and podcasting studios and know the difference between and XML feed and Quicktime video... as long as these are the types who running the conversation, the conversation becomes, not surprisingly, about them and their lives. Hundreds of millions of others are left out. Maybe in some sense that is the way it needs to be right now. Every person in the world who has no email address (or perhaps worse - an AOL email address) can't be considered, perhaps rightly, as equal to the conversation we are currently having (like this one for instance) as someone more technical.

But over time, this needs to change. I've done a lot of studies of email responses over the years. I purposely send out emails occasionally to "bait" people into responding. Most don't. And yet, when I see them in person, sometimes a half-year later, they will bring it up and comment on it. Sometimes with very interesting and intelligent comments. When I ask, "Hey, why didn't you just reply?", I get a lot of answers. But lurking beneath those answers I get the same feeling I've had for two decades when dealing with non-computer types - they feel a sense of guilt and dirtiness for being even geeky enough to read emails frequently, for even admitting that they sometimes enjoy those pesky machines in the corner.

Notice: No one thinks this way about television anymore. Not about radio - no way. Not about going to meetings at the local library or church or neighborhood community center. Or the bar. Most people feel free to express themselves and get involved at those venues.

But on the computer, on the internet, it remains a vast and technical landscape, run by geeks mostly for geeks. (I'm using the word "geek" in a liberal, non-threatening way here: substitute techie or smart guy/gal if it makes you feel better).

My dream then, is this: To see the next "killer app" on the net that becomes and is completely available to everyone (no signup for $19.99/month), is built-in to every hosting account (Apache/Windows) and enables the easiest transition to community involvement for the layperson. Forget blogging. I'm talking about conversing. We tend to view it as the same, but the rest of the world doesn't. They'll communicate all evening in someone's living room with a cold beer in their hand, but they'd sooner have their nose hairs plucked then to get on the computer and type a "blog post".

We, the blogging world, need to remedy that. We need to promote tools and methods that bring average people in to this conversation. And we need to shun those tools that exclude them. I think we unconsciously are doing that (i.e. promotion of feed readers, email subscriptions for blogs), but I haven't seen much that purposely says "Let me go overboard to get the rest of the real world involved".

I forgot to say that I'm not a gamer, so I'd like to abstain from the contest. I just wanted to share the story.
Michele

Below is a story about how a website community deeply effected the lives of my second grade class:

The gleeful squeals of anticipation from bouncing little girls gave way to a stilled silence of wide-eyed, stunned awe, as twenty-one magenta-and-black backstage passes were distributed down this front row of young concert-goers. Small hand after small hand carefully peeled off the paper backing and reverently placed the boldly colored placard on their fronts. For some of the smallest amongst us, this promissory square bearing the artist's image almost covered completely their velvet-and-ribboned bodices. In the eternity of the next ten minutes, as we waited anxiously for our escort backstage, well-meaning and curious strangers made their way to the front row and voiced the wonderings of hundreds of onlookers: Who are you? How did you get your passes? Do you ALL get to see JOSH???

The short answer would be: we are a blessed and fortunate group of inner-city youth who were asked to be special backstage guests of Josh Groban before he took the stage in Phoenix on March 17, 2005. How we came to receive such an unbelievably gracious invitation is a much lengthier answer, indeed. The story begins over two years ago, when I first brought Josh’s debut CD into my classroom of first- and second graders.

I teach in a small, multi-age classroom charter school in the very heart of Tucson, Arizona. In our school, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, we have a total of 80 students. In my class I had but nine children. We operate in, as our local newspaper recently put it, “one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city.” Noted for its crime, this is not a place you would want to walk around at night. The streets are lined with tiny houses in various states of disrepair, some with chain-link dirt yards which harbor large, territorial dogs. On the occasional morning I would have to clear away the abandoned, empty alcohol bottles from the back door of my classroom.

Most of the children from this environment have never listened to any type of music other than rap, R&B or rock (and rock is becoming so passé to this population, it is considered a very nerdy musical preference). Indeed, many of my students were not aware that other genres of music even existed. In the beginning, outside of classroom singing, I had no other method through which to open up this world to them, for schools are perpetually operating on shoestring budgets and a CD player was just not feasible. At last, midway through the school year we were able to acquire one, and the children finally had their first taste of recorded music from worlds they never knew existed. I had brought in my own modest collection of which they had their daily choice of listening.

Out of these selections, “Josh Groban” was repeatedly slipped by small hands daily into the CD player. The effects were notable. They had never heard anything like this before. No matter what they happened to be working on, The Voice would reach their ears, momentarily captivating them, inevitably followed by the breathless, awestruck comment: “He sure does sing good.” Various little bodies would sometimes lie quietly and contentedly on the rug during free-time close to the boom box and allow the music to just flow over them. For one little boy in particular, it was life-changing. My eight year old student named Josh had not only severe speech problems, but also a serious reading disability. Although Josh was immeasurably precious in his compassion and helpfulness, he had all but given up on putting forth effort to even try to learn the entire alphabet. Never before had he encountered such a moving, powerful sound as this that came from the CD, and when he learned that this astounding voice emanated from a person named Josh, the affinity he immediately sensed motivated him to overcome his greatest challenges, and miraculously begin to learn to read.

As we progressed through that particular school year, I gradually became more aware that this class was no ordinary group of children. As I grew to know each one better, every child – every last one of them – had their own critical challenge to survive in their life. Some days, depending upon what the previous night or early morning had wrought, our class time resembled more of a support group than a classroom. You can’t concentrate on addition and subtraction or “i before e” when dad has abruptly left your family the night before. Some of these children were coming to school with serious issues, and given our small size, we used the opportunity to learn not only academics, but how to be a true friend. As we progressed in our school year, we learned how to listen, and we learned to ask the right questions. They learned how to distinguish good secrets and bad secrets, and most of all, how to give the gift of just being sad along with a friend rather than trying to fix it or make it better. They learned not only to care for each other, but how to verbalize it. And as I watched this challenged, yet remarkable, group of young children evolve from being a small class into a large family, the message in the song “You Raise Me Up” became their reality. They raised each other up throughout their hardships, and the song consciously became their anthem. As this metamorphosis continued, to my awe, I became acutely aware of just how fortunate I was to be sharing this year with these particular children, and I am convinced that something more than fate had led us all to the same time and place. Given their extraordinariness, I know these nine were brought together for reasons greater than simply educating them.

On the main website, they used the “Write to Josh” page almost every day, painstakingly typing out adoring messages and practicing their writing skills. I noticed that Sky had surfed her way over to the message boards. She was looking at the first page of the main forum … not doing anything, just reading the titles of the threads. I knew what she had stumbled upon but I casually inquired, “Sky, what have you found there?” She turned around and said with wonder, “I don’t know … but it sure looks like fun!”

I don’t know why I had not before considered that instead of passionately (albeit fruitlessly) writing to Josh over and over and over, they could actually interact with other fans. I asked them, “How would you guys like to write to other fans of Josh’s, who will actually write back to you?” I got a resounding, enthusiastic, “Yeah!!” and with that, the 2nd Grade Grobanites thread was born in the Discussions forum. It did not take more than two minutes before heaps of gracious Grobanites were posting back to these little ones, which spurred unfathomable wonder in the young minds on our end of the keyboard: “Who are these people?” “How do they know who we are?” “How do they read what we write?” “Do they all like Josh as much as we do?”

For an entire semester, the children not only shared their enthusiasm about Josh, but also came to relish the opportunity to share the joys and tribulations of their lives with others who so generously took the time to interact with a group of seven- and eight-year-olds. Our field trips, our topics of study, our artwork, our celebrations, our birthdays, and our achievements were chronicled by young fingers and received by benevolent grown-up friends. The fans who interacted with the children may have never fully understood what a gift this was to my students. From this neighborhood, the environment, and the family situations which some of them originated, some of my kids just didn’t have adequate enough adults in their lives to care about what they painted in school, or what they ate for lunch. But their website community friends did. They always did. They will never really know how instrumental they were in teaching this assorted group of disadvantaged children that there are compassionate people in this world who care. And in the end, in the good-bye message Jasmine posted, I think she summed it up best: “It was nice talking to good people.” (The thread, residing in the Archives forum, was unfortunately lost with a hacker’s attack, and is not recoverable.)

After the site administration read about this group of extraordinary children, we were graciously extended an invitation to meet with Josh himself. Josh kindly shared his time with the kids, listening to every word, autographing every peculiar item (Ariel brought her diary!), encompassing as many as he could into his outstretched arms for unending pictures, graciously accepting every token gift like it was one of the best things anyone had ever given him. He spent about fifteen minutes with our bubbly crew, and then said good bye as they floated back to the front-row seats kindly reserved for us.

Many of their fan friends from the website community generously crafted, donated and mailed gift bags to us. The kids had bracelets, stickers, flowers, pins, magnets and pictures. It took a full week for the students to come down off of their high, but all were left with an indelible memory of one of the greatest evenings of their lives. They are all genuinely, sincerely grateful. More than the concert, or the gifts, or even meeting their beloved Josh, the kindness and regard so generously shown to them by so many strangers-become-friends is a precious and unique gift which they all recognize, and will treasure forever.

Michele

I have vivid memories of the first on-line community I ever participated in.

In April of 1998, the Blizzard game company released Starcraft, a Real Time Strategy game with a space-y theme, and three races battling it out for dominance of the universe. Along with it came Battle.net, a site where players who bought the game could do battle with each other. It was a revolution of sorts; on-line gaming had been around for a little bit, but never at this scale.

I bought the game and was immediately addicted. There was depth of strategy, decent graphics and sound (at the time), and no end to the types of on-line opponents you could play against.

After I'd been playing on battle.net a while, I happened across a user-run fan site called "Shockwave's forum". This forum was dedicated to discussing strategies in the Starcraft game. I started off as a lurker, reading people's arguments over which race was the most overpowered, how to counter "cheap" strategies like the six zergling rush, and what everyone thought the game company should to do fix the imbalances in the game.

Soon, I had enough experience with the different topics that I started posting there. I picked the nickname "Dimwetoth". I was surprised and pleased to find that my posts were well received, which prompted me to post even more. Of course, anytime anybody replied to me, they always started their post with "Hey Dim." I have been addicted to on-line communities ever since.

I still remember some of the characters that frequented that forum. Fearless Fosdick, the ever-grumpy old man who never had a good thing to say about anybody, but was right most of the time. Protossrulz, who was convinced that the Protoss were the master race in the universe (even though they were a figment of a developer's imagination). And the ever-present Shockwave, our forum's leader and moderator, who always kept an even keel and was quick to facilitate a lagging discussion or calm people down when they started making personal attacks against others. He was the glue that held the community together.

As time went by, and all the strategies had been discussed over and over again, Shockwave's forum came to be a place where the regulars would just talk about how things were going in life - who had what job (or lost their job), the family vacation, where to eat/find nightlife/sleep in . It became a real circle of friends who really only shared one piece of common ground when they first came to the site.

Sadly, in 2002, Shockwave's forum shut down. I followed this forum from the time I stumbled across it until it was shut down, and watched as the posts started to tail off and people stopped coming by. Some call it natural progression because the game got old. I just chalked it up to "all good things must come to an end".

RIP Shockwave's forum. Haven't thought about you in years. Thanks to the community guy site for stirring up some fond memories.

Excluding some modem-to-modem connections in the early '90s, my first experience online came in 1995. Irving, a photographer at Xavier University who once snapped a great portrait of Wynton Marsalis playing at a mayoral inauguration, sent me home with some modem commands to let me connect to the Internet. There were three or four steps involved. A few key presses and some signature static squawk later, and I was connected to the world.

The problem, though, quickly became apparent. I didn't know what to do next. I had no browser, no email client, no destination. I was just ... connected. The thought paralyzed me. It was like stepping through a door onto a ledge facing an endless void. Worse, that door closed behind me — Irving neglected to tell me how to disconnect.

In a panic, I did the only thing that came to mind. I pulled the plug. To be more precise, I ripped the power cord out of the wall socket with such force as to knock over my open Coke and startle a cat. The Internet, I learned, was an intimidating place to be new.